The Box

If the Lewises push the button, a stranger will die, but they’ll receive a million dollars. After some deliberation, they go for it. The resolve Diaz uses to smack the button is the same used by people hitting the Easy button in those Staples ads. But Kelly could have stamped his button with “hard.’’ The consequences are strange and brutally inhuman. The Lewises have no idea why suddenly they’re being followed and watched. Neither do we. The movie leaves Norma and Arthur in order to follow their suddenly somnambulant babysitter’s stroll through some creepy motel called the Galaxy. There’s also a detour for a domestic crime scene across town and doings at NASA, which just rejected Arthur’s astronaut application. It’s all alluringly random. Something ominous is going on, and the pleasure of this movie is that we can feel it more than we can entirely understand it.

This is a freak-out along the lines of “Rosemary’s Baby,’’ “Don’t Look Now,’’ “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’’ or “The Shining,’’ where a director’s simple understanding of where to put a camera or when to cut away radically changes how an image affects you. When Arlington tells Norma that he is calling from outside the house, there’s a cut to man, looking into her kitchen window, who is not Frank Langella. The camera follows him from window to window as he circles the house. The average commercial horror movie would have found a way to julienne this sequence into a thousand cuts, complete with sound effects and inserts of images that have nothing to do with it. Presented the way it is in “The Box,’’ we see what Norma sees, and the scene is all the more chilling for it. There’s another creepy, entertainingly orchestrated chase through the Boston Public Library - the city stands in for wintry Virginia.